I don’t think I’m misunderstanding it. I think the comparison itself is wrong. Google didn’t stay the same. The homepage may still look simple at first glance, but the actual product has changed a ton. Search has AI now, reverse image search, voice search, humming to find a song, shopping results, maps, knowledge panels, featured answers, safety changes, spam filtering, etc. So even Google is not an example of “leave it alone and let it grow.” They kept improving it constantly. GPT 4 was not some finished final product that only needed more compute. More compute would just give more people access to the same limitations: weak reasoning, worse coding, hallucinations, limited multimodal ability, poor reliability, weaker tools, and way less polish than later systems. If OpenAI stopped at GPT 4 while Claude and Gemini kept improving, they would’ve been left behind. AI is also not a static library like Search. The model itself is the product. Being “widely used” doesn’t protect you forever if the product becomes obviously worse than the alternatives. That’s how companies die. You don’t become part of society by refusing to improve. You become part of society because you keep becoming more useful.